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Mesa 7.3 Release Candidate 2 Now Available

01-14-2009, 08:30 PM

Phoronix: Mesa 7.3 Release Candidate 2 Now Available

Just five days after announcing the Mesa 7.3 Release Candidate 1 with improved GLSL 1.20 support, Intel GEM support, and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2 integration, the second release candidate has now surfaced. Mesa 7.3 Release Candidate 2 has over 50 new commits that mostly bring build fixes for OpenBSD and Windows operating systems. This release also has build fixes for those still using GCC 2.95...

Comment

Mesa itself has supported OpenGL 2 (2.1, I think) for a while - but hardware acceleration varies from chip to chip. General consensus is that you need memory management to properly hardware-accelerate some of the OpenGL 2 functions, so GL 2 support tends to come after memory management. Right now I think Intel has initial OpenGL 2 support using Mesa but most other open source hardware drivers are around GL 1.3 until memory management gets into drm master and/or the kernel.

This is one of the reasons memory management (GEM, TTM) is such a hot issue for the developers -- almost everything else is dependent on it, including KMS, DRI2, Gallium3D etc. Strictly speaking Gallium3D does not need to be dependent on memory management, but most of the winsys implementations were written that way and nobody wants to spend their time recoding for a pre-mm environment then throw the work away once memory management arrives.

Proprietary drivers are a different story -- they have had pretty advanced memory managers and GL 2.x support for a long time.